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“... When the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) travelled to Europe in 1822 he was carrying letters of introduction to Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Lafayette and Talleyrand, though he never actually met any of them – whether through shyness or negligence or something else is not clear. Dickens called on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a mere imitator ...”

“... be lived out as part of the pain of the earth’. In a chapter entitled ‘The Pink Triangle’, Gregory Woods writes: After the ‘liberation’ of the camps by the Allies, those survivors who wore the pink triangle – denoting that they had been imprisoned as homosexuals – were treated as common criminals who had deserved their ...”

“... becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the development in ...”

“... and said: ‘And this is the Bank of England. And do you sit here all day and never see the green woods and the trees and the flowers and the charming country? Are you contented with such a life?’ And all the time he nursed his little ...”

“... is what can happen to great houses with ambiguous legacies.The copper beech tree on which Lady Gregory’s guests carved their names is close by. You can just make out some of the initials: GBS, SOC, WBY, JBY, AE. ‘All/That comes of the best knit to the best,’ Yeats wrote in ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’. Lady ...”

“... egged on by the clenched fists of peasants and shadowed by the police. After hiding in the woods they had to walk over the Pyrenees, dodging the searchlights and bullets of French border guards. The high, simple principle which took them out to Spain seems to have sustained these men – and one woman – through pain, terror, and the confusion and ...”

“... go to Innisfree, and plant nine bean rows there, is chided for preferring to take tea with Lady Gregory. He is not. For the serendipitous, there are quaint facts in plenty. The first man suspended for saying ‘damn’ in the Commons seems to have been that flamboyant Scot, Cunninghame Graham, then Liberal Member for South Lanark. Lord Vansittart is surely ...”

“... wants to be taken seriously, the same urge felt by the bestselling historical novelist Philippa Gregory, whose Women of the Cousins’ War (2011) is scholarly non-fiction, co-authored with two historians, exploring the lives of three late-medieval women featured in her novels. Both have PhDs – Gregory in English ...”

“... empire that the Church would take over as its own. But they did not all attempt to be universal. Gregory of Tours in the late sixth century, the opening of whose candid and ramshackle History of the Franks might be the most engaging of any work of history – ‘A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad’ – came to concentrate on events in ...”

“... England is that in Ireland ‘the conventions of English Romanticism, its blessings in the gentle woods, its brooks that murmur and its winds that cry, were simply implausible.’ Irish landscape is determined rather by individual acts of will, violent and transient. Hence ‘ruined castles, ruined houses, ruined towers round or square, mark achievement that ...”

“... Since I have seen him clear, Whether he fondle a golden mare Which he has ridden through wet woods, Or in the sunlight by the water Stand silent as a tree, this verse no longer weeps.The androgynous beauty of the poem’s addressee, who is initially pictured as a Wildean decadent (‘Give him a pale skin, a long hand,/A grey eye with deep eyelids, with ...”

“... Places in fiction often have a curious dual nationality. They are entangled in historical events, marked on a solid social map. ‘It’s not exactly the moon I’m asking for,’ a girl thinks in The Dark Hole Days, ‘but surely all my dreams don’t end here: me in a duffle coat signing on the dole and walking in the debris of Belfast.’ Later she adds: ‘Belfast would fit into a corner of London ...”

“... but by bureaucrats. In 1834, John Phipps, an assistant surveyor for London in the Office of Woods and Forests, was tasked with finding more office space in the cluttered Exchequer buildings at Westminster. He discovered that a whole suite of rooms was being used for the storage of old tally-sticks, great stacks of obsolete financial records notched on ...”

“... up to pay their last respects, lining up for three days on the lanes that ran through the birch woods, even though there had been only the smallest death notice in the newspapers and though public expressions of grief were not, to put it mildly, encouraged. Upstairs, we are shown the desk where Pasternak wrote – always the climax of a visit to a ...”

“... famous educational experiments in history. Itard had taken into his care a young boy found in the woods of the Aveyron. The boy had been without human contact for so long that he seemed almost an animal. Itard named him Victor and invented many exercises with the aim of turning him into an educated French child, although he ultimately conceded defeat and took ...”